Home of Rakit Studios : Creators of Convenience Wars

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Hi guys, it’s been a long time, several months in fact. We are back! Seems that life kinda just got in the way of everything, as seems to happen. However it turned out to be a very good thing. The entire Rakit Studios team has come back together and been working hard for a week on a redesign sprint. We’re not totally finished yet, but we’re finished enough that we wanted to share a few things with you.

User Interface
One thing we hadn’t worked on at all before was the user interface. We had discussed it many times, but decided as a team that working on the content of the game was more important. However, after our hiatus, it seemed very important to us to create the look’n’feel that players would experience. Cue AliasVegas, bringing in the designing guns and firing out a fifty calibre design. We’re all totally stoked about it and it inspired us not only to rework the logo, which secretly I was the only person who seemed to like it, but to decide that we had completed our logo. The GUI was designed around being app like, bubbly and simple to use. There was a great focus on a fresh feeling. Since our VN is about two convenience stores, it sort of fit that we would go for a stylish, clean and very over produced GUI.

Take a look at some of the screenshots below:

Title Screen GUI

In Game GUI

Preferences GUI

Save Load GUI

Logo
The logo was reworked after the Main Screen had been designed by AliasVegas. The colours and feel she had chosen were worked in to the logo by cbx33 (me). I felt it was important to maintain the same look’n’feel in the logo that was present in the GUI and the team seemed to agree. After the initial logo concept, we actually went through only very minor changes. That in itself was proof to us that we had finally hit on the right logo for our VN. I’ve often found in design work, though I’m no designer, that a design is finished when you add something and decide the design is better off without it.

Logo Design

Characters
Though we’re only giving you a brief preview today, all of the Convenience Wars characters have undergone major redesigns. This isn’t to say the original characters were bad at all, but through the break period, AliasVegas, our Art Director, really began thinking a lot more about character design and how to make them feel more real. As we reveal more of the characters you will notice how different they are and hopefully see that we’ve dolloped an extra amount of care and attention this time around too.

Yukito Redesigned

CG Backgrounds
Well. What can I say here. We’ve had a huge change of direction here. I previously posted about using the Edge Detection node setup that we were using in Blender for the outlines. Turns out that during our break, Freestyle was integrated into Blender. Freestyle is a much more configurable way of introducing edge lines in Blender. I toyed with this for a few weeks, but during the sprint, we decided that we didn’t actually want to use outlines in our backgrounds at all. That was one of the biggest shifts in the design work and coupled with taking a more realistic approach, we ended up with an image which is completely different from the original.

Classroom Old

Classroom Redesigned

We spent a large amount of time on the lighting, working on just the right setup to get the shadows plus the bloom effect on the window areas. sbx34 and I worked together for several hours producing render after render. As it turns out, the new way of rendering our scenes turns out to be a lot less compute intensive that previous, so bonus all round then! We also made the decision to upscale the game from 1280×720 to 1366×768. We did consider HD, but for this VN, we’ll be sticking to the latter. We didn’t want the possibility of the game slowing down on older machines and so decided against HD. sbx34 has been becoming very well acquainted with CG trees. We need a forest. I think he hates me.

So as you can see a very very busy time. All of the GUI work, redesigned Yukito, rendering, basically everything discussed in this post was achieved in a week. We’ve really worked flat-out and I think proven to ourselves that we definitely have what it takes to make Convenience Wars a success.

Let us know what you think – we’re gonna take a break for a few minutes

It’s been a little whilst since we last posted an update on here as to how the game was progressing, particularly related to the topic of graphics. The in-game sprites are progressing well and Friday will most likely see the inclusion of yet another Character Friday to the blog. We are in fact nearing the end of the character updates, but that does not mean that we are finished with generating the assets. It will just signify that the majority of character design is complete.

We have a large number of significant characters and that in itself has been a challenge. It was also key to the story and something which wouldn’t have worked with a smaller cast. Recently though, the backend development team, including myself and sbx34 have shifted our attention away from scripting and coding, and focussed on something much less to our strengths. Background art.

We did post a while back that the background art was in progress. Due to circumstances beyond her control, our BG artists time has been very limited. The other problem was that our demand for BGs only seemed to increase. Mix a decrease in resource with an increase in demand and you are left with a recipe for disaster.

So we were left with a choice. Find another artist, use photos, or find some other way to generate backgrounds.

The first was not really an option. For this game we wanted to keep the staff a) local and b) in the family, so to speak. The second didn’t leave us with a good feeling. When you are putting beautifully drawn characters over photos, no matter how well they are manipulated in Photoshop, it never quite seems to hit the mark.

So option three, find some other way to get backgrounds was chosen. Given that it was the most difficult of the three we weren’t hopeful of a solution. I had spent a reasonable amount of time looking into the prospect of using CGI for the backgrounds, but hadn’t had great success finding something that fit well with us.

Blender was the obvious choice for the modeller and renderer, but making the models look toon shaded, or like they had been drawn, was difficult. We found out about the Freestyle addition to Blender, but me being me, I wanted to use an official Blender build and not have to worry about compiling the darn thing every time we wanted to upgrade to fix a bug and ensure that both sbx34 and myself were in sync.

Looking around further I found the blog of StudioLLB. In there, Light described a way they had put together to detect and draw edges using a compositing technique. I downloaded the files and had a play and was suitably impressed with the results. After a little tweaking, we had a test scene which we were happy with. It wasn’t perfect and still had some artifacts on it which needed to be removed, but overall it seemed to function well. Some early feedback from some Ren’Py IRC channel users who are close to the team suggested to us that we were pretty close to hitting the mark. The backgrounds worked and were accepted. This was a huge step.

We have a reasonable number of models from another project we worked on, but there are still a few scenes that we are going to have to model ourselves, unfortunately these are going to be the most difficult, namely the two convenience stores themselves.

Below is a screen shot of our modified version of StudioLLB’s Edge Detection Technique. Once we have tweaked a few things a little further, I would like to release a Blender file to allow others to piggy back off the technique. We added a bloom type filter into the mix to give the dreamier feel to the scenes. As a result of my technique for doing this, it increases the contrast of the image dramatically, so we compensate for that by adding a levels node to adjust the contrast. In the top right hand corner of the setup is a simple switch allowing the CG artist to turn the entire compositing block either on or off. As compositing adds extra render time, it allows the artist to work quickly but still flexibly see how the end result will look.

The next screen shot shows a locker scene. The models were from a set which we had purchased previously and all we really did was to light the scene. This required little effort and the image has had no post processing done in an external application. Everything you see here was done in a single render pass with compositing included. It shows both the outlining from the EdgeNode system from StudioLLB and the bloom effect that we added in ourselves. The scene took probably about 20 minutes to light. There are improvements to be made. We are under no illusion that it’s perfect, but it serves as a good enough test to prove that the technique is successful. I should point out here that there are no textures used in this at all.

We now have a classroom scene. Again, the models were provided from a third-party set which we have purchased previously. sbx34 was responsible for lighting this one and we made use of the volumetric lighting to give the scene that dreamy anime look which I’m personally a real sucker for. We’ve lightly textured some of the items in the room, but not so much as to make the useage of CG overly obvious. There are actually three lights in this room. One is a hemispherical light to give an ambient level so that things which are in shadow are not jet black. The other two are coincident and are used for the sunlight and volumetric effect respectively.

The last scene is unfinished, but is the beginnings of the outside of the Yuudai-Mart store. This is our own model. I’m responsible for most of the modelling at the moment and we will see this scene unfolding as we move forward. Putting tons of products on the shelves is going to prove troublesome, but hey, we’ll give it our best shot. You will notice in this render there are some artifacts on the roof. These are as a result of the edge detection routine in the EdgeNode system, but with a little tweaking, we can remove them.

So please, give us your feedback on how you think these early renders look and let us know if you are interested in learning more about the technique once we have finalised and tweaked it.

So, we worked on this for a long time, and it’s evolved from a very simple idea to something a little less simple. It’s funny how often we can settle for something before blowing our own expectations away. The original logo we tried I was “happy” with, until I came up with number two. After speaking to people in the RenPy channel, (you know who you are), we decided to rework the logo completely.

So, first we looked at putting the characters into the second logo. It was a good idea, but without it being larger, it just didn’t work. If we had a four letter acronym or something like that it would have been possible to pick four prominent figures and have them featured, one on each letter.

Next we worked on something which has the letter close to the final version, rejigging the positions of the word WARS to make it a little more dynamic and adding shopping cart in the background. Originally the cart was supposed to look like a stamp, but it proved difficult to get the texture right.

Unfortunately, we just couldn’t get the shopping cart to look how we wanted and decided to dispence with it entirely. Out of desperation, we played with a few ideas and the explosive star was born.

And so we arrive at our final logo….for now? I’m not sure, but we all seem happy enough with it. The star was edited without a cutout of another start offset to give an explosion. We also changed the drop shadow colour and overlayed a Gaussian Blur layer to take away some of the sharp edges.

So, logo idea number two. We have taken it in a slightly different direction. I have to say I personally like this much more than #1, but then there are a few people who feel the other way. Comments? Which do you prefer?

So we’ve come up with one idea for the Convenience Wars logo. There were a few themes that we were attempting to get across. The logo had to be clean and easily readable. With us being a very small, and at the moment non-profit, organisation, we had to make the logo stand out and be instantly recognisable, though I guess that last part is true of most logos.

We also wanted to get across the idea of the logo actually being a shop’s logo. So we chose a very clean font. Making the text italic seemed to give it a much more retail look. The shopping cart was added just to bring down the tone slightly and make it a little more fun. We have toyed with the idea of putting various things in the cart and that may be something that happens over the coming days and weeks. Still, this is the first effort. Comments and suggestions welcome as always.